Presently, gravure cylinder printing technology is used extensively in the printing industry for high quality, high volume printing applications. Gravure cylinder printing employs a printing press loaded with one or more gravure cylinders, each engraved with text and/or images. Gravure cylinders have been engraved with an engraving head of a machine such as a Helio-Klischograph manufactured by Dr. Ing. Rudolf Hell GmbH. The engraving head of the Helio-Klischograph uses a diamond stylus to create small depressions known as cells in the surface of the gravure cylinder. During this process, cells are engraved into the gravure cylinder in patterns forming the text and/or images to be printed. Once a gravure cylinder has been engraved as desired, it is loaded into the printing press. In order to print, the outer surface of an engraved gravure cylinder is coated with ink. Excess ink, that is, ink not contained by the cells, is removed with a doctor blade, thus preventing ink from being deposited onto what is intended to be a non-printing area.
Although it is desirable to make improvements in gravure cylinder printing, unfortunately, improvements in the gravure cylinder printing process are significantly constrained by the current limited ability to quickly produce high quality engraved cylinders. Present methods of engraving gravure cylinders, such as employing the Helio-Klischograph mentioned above, are relatively slow and time-consuming. Furthermore, in order to produce higher quality printing, greater resolution is required. Unfortunately, to achieve high resolution (greater cell density) with the Helio-Klischograph, even more time is required to fully engrave the gravure cylinder to engrave the additional cells. Moreover, even if the engraver has the luxury of time, cell density is limited by inherent mechanical aspects of the Helio-Klischograph technique which require the machine to control cell size and spacing while the engraving stylus is being moved over the surface of the gravure cylinder. Accordingly, it would be desirable to be able to much more rapidly engrave gravure cylinders. It would also be desirable to be able to engrave gravure cylinders at a much greater resolution than current methods practically allow. Furthermore, it would be desirable to be able to engrave gravure cylinders at a high resolution without paying a significant speed penalty.
Faster imaging of gravure cylinders would increase the throughput of an existing gravure cylinder facility by providing more cylinders in a given time. The additional throughput would enable existing facilities to meet the growing demand for shorter runs.